To be accurate, Mama Says is not so much calling it a “day” as we are calling it an “era.” The Era of Our Children’s Young Childhood was the time when a project like this made sense for our family. But in this new era of homework and music lessons and weekends filled to capacity with family activities and neglected chores, its been less clear how Mama Says fits into the picture.
Since our youngest child entered kindergarten more than a year ago, we’ve tinkered with the newsletter continuously to try to transform it into the project of our children’s school years. But no matter how my patient husband (and webmaster) improved the delivery method, the time needed to do a good job of researching and writing the thing didn’t diminish.
During the same period of time, many things have happened in the world, our community and in our family to make me want to work on different sorts of projects. So this is the end of Mama Says as we know it. John and I will keep the website online for as long as the archived data has some value. After that, it may eventually become a regular blog, should I ever develop the self discipline required for such a project. But I will no longer use the mailing list. If you want to find out about getting on an email list for play group or Night Out announcements, please contact me directly at laura@fratus.com, and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Before we sign off, we’d like to acknowledge and express belated gratitude to a few of the people who supported Mama Says for the past five years. Readers, writers, event organizers, alert parents who sent us tips: thank you for your generosity. And most especially, thank you to our role models in this endeavor: those neighbors who got an idea in their heads about a way to improve the quality of life for people living in the central city, and then proceeded to dedicate years and decades of their energy to realizing their own beautiful visions. We may not have public trash receptacles anymore, but as long as there’s a Near West Theatre, a Cleveland Public Theatre, a Plain Press or a single activist church throwing its doors wide open, ours will remain the most affluent neighborhood in northeast Ohio.
Okay, enough already. Have fun, loyal readers.
Laura Fratus